There is Power in the Name of Jesus

“And he said to them, “Go into the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any dealy poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” – Jesus, Mark 16:15-18

OK, the last post, as long as it was, only covered Monday and Tuesday of last week. So here’s another one, and we’ll see how far I get with it.

When Wednesday rolled around, Jono and Mary took our lecture to another level, even beyond what we had done before. We began to talk about releasing the Holy Spirit that is in all of us and how powerful that is. Then we moved on in the last couple days to talk about the gifts of the Spirit, including all the ones that much of the American church kind of overlooks, like miracles, speaking in tongues, and prophecy.

Jono began on Wednesday by saying that the problem for most Christians is that we don’t activate the reality of the Holy Spirit in our lives. To explain what he meant by that, he started by reading John 20:19-23:

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”(John 20:19-23 ESV)

Based on this verse and pretty much the entire New Testament, it is a fact that anyone who believes in Jesus and confesses him as Savior receives the Holy Spirit of God and becomes a new creation. Yes, ALL Christians have the power of the Holy Spirit! But anyone who has been to church for long has heard that. Why, then, are all of these Christians today not doing miracles and healing people and raising the dead like Jesus and his disciples and early Christians? The answer to that also lies in Scripture. If you’ll notice, even though the disciples received the Spirit from Jesus here in John, they didn’t start doing awesome stuff until Pentecost in Acts. As Jono explained, this was because the reality of the Holy Spirit did not manifest itself in them until Pentecost. It’s not that it wasn’t there, it’s just that they didn’t really understand what it was until Jesus revealed it to them. At Pentecost, as the Spirit came down in tongues of fire, Jesus revealed to Peter that the awesome Son of God that he followed was now living inside his body, and all the power that Jesus had was his! He was not an uneducated fisherman; he was a son of God and filled with God’s Spirit! So he preached with the authority of that Spirit, and 3,000 people were saved.

The thing that we’ve missed so completely in much of the Western church (or at least what I’ve seen of it) is that all of us are meant to do things like Peter and Jesus. All Christians are filled with the Holy Spirit, and we weren’t just meant to wait around until we can go to heaven. God means for us, filled with Himself, to go out and essentially bring Heaven down to Earth through the power of His Spirit and the authority of the name of Jesus. He wants us to pour out love on the world, and He wants to heal the sick, cast out demons, raise the dead, and bring truth through us, His hands and feet! When He asked us to pray “Your kingdom come; Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” He meant for us to be a part of that! He loves His children and wants to bring healing and restoration through a body of people who have surrendered their own will and are living according to His.

But we don’t believe this, really. We live like God is far away most of the time, not right inside us. We’re absolutely brimming with the Holy Spirit of God and we have the authority of the name of Jesus, but we don’t have any idea what that means! We go to church and wish that we could be really spiritual like some people because then we might be able to do something amazing through God’s power. We haven’t really seen any miracles happen (and we’ve only heard about a few), so we’re pretty sure those only happen to people who are really faithful, and even start to think it must be God’s will for some people to be sick and for some to die before their time. But the truth is that it is never God’s will for someone to be sick – No one is sick in heaven – and it’s often not God’s will for people to die when they do. And we don’t have to wish that we had the power to heal people, because WE DO HAVE IT! It just has to be activated by surrendering to God and asking Him to reveal Himself. We don’t have to be special or extra spiritual or anything, because it’s all God’s power, not ours. He can work just fine even in our weakness, even when we don’t feel supernatural. He can do things that would otherwise be impossible, but we have to submit to Him and let Him do it. The normal Christian life is full of miracles!

There have been several times during this DTS when I have thought, concerning myself and so many other Christians: How did we miss this?!? This was one of those times. We are all full of the power of God, but we don’t use it. There is incredible power in prayer and in our words to heal, restore, break chains, bring forgiveness, and do all sorts of good things, but most the time I have set my expectations far too low and have not even asked God for any of these things. Oftentimes I have felt like I didn’t have any faith, but I felt like it was my job to be faithful, so I didn’t ask God to give me faith. It turns out that we miss out on all kinds of things because we just don’t ask for them. God loves to give good things to his kids.

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!(Matthew 7:7-11 ESV)
 You do not have, because you do not ask. (James 4:2b)

Now, all of this may be hard to swallow out of the context of Jono and Mary’s teaching. It is so real to us here, however, because they told so many stories of these things happening (like Jono curing someone’s cancer) and we have actually experienced them here. For example, one girl here, Madelyn, was gluten intolerant and couldn’t eat anything with wheat, oats, etc. until she was prayed for this week. Now she has been eating gluten for several days and shows no ill effects! Praise Jesus! We have also had lots of experiences with prophetic words that spoke very specifically to different people. For example, Jono was praying over many of us on Wednesday and giving prophetic words when God spoke to him. When he reached Michael, he had a vision of him flying, which was the exact same thing Michael had seen earlier and hadn’t told anyone about. Or later, when we split up into partners to practice prophecy, Adam ended up describing to Derek the dream that he (Derek) had had the night before but had not shared with anyone. Being here and seeing God work constantly in tons of different ways makes it impossible not to believe that He exists or that he doesn’t do miracles any more.

So that brings me to the last couple days of the week, when we talked about the different spiritual gifts. They focused on the gifts in 1 Corinthians 12, which they divided up into three types: gifts of utterance (prophecy, tongues, interpretation of tongues), gifts of power (faith, miracles, gift of healing), and gifts of revelation (word of knowledge, word of wisdom, and discernment. They went on to explain that these gifts are never earned, but are given even though we don’t deserve them – we just have to ask. Also, they explained that all of these gifts are specifically given to build others up and are not for your own benefit, with one exception. The exception is the gift of tongues, which for many can be a personal prayer language given so that one can be even more connected with God. Jono taught that anyone can pretty much have any of these gifts because we are all filled with the Holy Spirit. God can give us whichever gift we need most at any time. Again, the key is just to surrender and let God work through us.

For me, this was really an introduction to some of these gifts because we don’t really talk about them much in my church background.  But I have really seen that God still uses all of these gifts, and when it is really from His Spirit there is nothing weird or creepy about it. Rather, prophetic words turn out to be incredibly encouraging, and speaking in tongues can really allow someone to personally connect on a very deep level with God or bring people to Jesus in a public setting.

On Friday, Jono did even more teaching that is so chock full of cool stuff that I won’t even try to go into all of it except to point out that it is essentially our mind, will, and emotions that limit the release of the Spirit in our lives. These are the parts of ourselves that we really have to surrender for God to work through us. Essentially, we will be as free and full of the Holy Spirit as we’ll allow ourselves to be, so we really need to give up control to God.

As you can see, we learned a silly amount this week and I can’t put most of it into words. But fortunately I’m not responsible for you understanding everything about the Holy Spirit. Nope, God’s in charge of that, and I trust Him. So just ask Him about His Spirit, and He’d be happy to help you understand who He is!

Spirited,

Dan